These stories are creepy enough on their own, but the worst part? They actually happened!
Has anything this creepy ever happened to you?
Comments edited for clarity.
When I was younger my dad was out was out of town and my mom let me have a few friends over. We lived right by a pretty busy highway and over the years had quite a few people knock on our door for help (car broken down, lost, accident, etc.).
While my mom was home with us a man knocked saying he wanted to borrow the phone. My mother told him he could sit on the porch and use her cellphone. The man kept asking to come inside and asking if my dad was home. He eventually started trying to force his way inside. My mom slammed and locked the door, called 911, and put my friends and I into a closet.
It took the police department 20+ minutes to reach us. By that time my mom had called our neighbor and he came over with his shotgun and made the guy lay on the ground until the police arrived.
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There used to be billboards for anti-drunk driving campaigns that would show a picture of a happy family or whatever and then let you know they were all killed by drunk drivers.
When I was about 16 I saw my own face on one of those signs. It was a picture of myself, my little brother, and my 2 childhood friends that lived next door to me when I was in first grade. So, maybe I’m dead. One of these billboards was right by my work so I had to look at it every day.
After telling my mom about it, she said the father of the kids next door was a photographer.
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I was 11, walking to the library with a friend when an old man approaches us and asks if we want to come to his house for Teddy bears and dolls…I don’t even stop, just keep walking. I look back and my friend is still there listening to him, I yell at her to hurry up and we go to the library. No big deal.
My mom picks me up later and I tell her the story and she immediately drives to the police station where I give a statement. The police investigated and it turned out that the guy really did have Teddy bears and dolls in his basement and regularly lured kids, without molesting or murdering them. He just had no idea he was being a creeper.
The police had to tell him that he was acting like an after school special villain and to knock it off and just donate the toys to charity.
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I’d just moved into a basement suite. Every time I went out I would lock the deadbolt but not the door handle but when I came home a lot of the time the deadbolt would be unlocked and the door handle would be locked. At first I thought I was just confused about which one I had locked so I started paying more attention.
It kept happening and I realized someone must be going in when I went out. I assumed it was the landlady and was annoyed but didn’t say anything at first. Then one day I came home and found the wrong lock locked again.
I went in angry and opened the fridge to get something to eat. There was a book in the fridge that I had never seen before. I collected old books and this one was published in the early 1900’s which creeped me out completely because it was like it had been left for me. I finally called my landlady and asked if she was going into my apartment and told her what had happened.
She freaked right out, said the last person who lived there was a really creepy guy with mental health and drug problems. She got all the locks changed that day and it never happened again.
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When I was about 14 my parents left me alone overnight for the first time. I grew up in a small farming community, so my parents really had nothing to worry about.
They left and I decided to take an awesome bubble bath and paint my nails like all girls everywhere, obviously. While I was in the bath, I heard our back door open. I thought I was hearing things, and besides, I had locked all the doors per my mom’s orders.
But then I heard the kitchen floor squeaky spot.
I didn’t know what to do so I just went under the bubbles and left my head out. I saw two shoes through the crack between the door and the floor. I could hear a person breathing. They stood there for about 30 seconds and then walked away. I heard the door slam but I didn’t move, I just stayed there until the water was freezing and cried.
Then I got out, called my grandma, and checked the doors. The back door was unlocked and the lock hadn’t been messed with or broken. Later that week we learned that a man was breaking into farm houses.
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I used to live in a rented house that sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out of my front door and sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars.
One night, around 1am, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That’s when I saw a man standing in the deserted park. He was directly in front of my house.
The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate but was most definitely a store bought cheapo.
The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn’t move at all-although I know he saw me.
The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground. We watched each other for a long time and then he sauntered away. I ended up calling the cops because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood.
Cops came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. Couple of months later, I’m doing some yard work around the side of my house. I’m pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window. I see something that looks like trash and pick it up.
It was the mask I saw that night.
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When I was about 9 or 10, my older brother and I had a few friends over to stay the night. My Dad had to work the next day so we were all left at the house by ourselves. We were excited to play playstation all day on our Saturday off.
Well my Dad worked late that night (until probably 8 or 9). As soon as the sun went down we went into one of the rooms upstairs to play Uno. Fast forward 30 minutes and we start hearing footsteps slowing walking up the wooden stairs.
My dad wasn’t going to be home for another 2 hours so we didn’t know who it was. There were four of us, me, my brother, my friend, and his friend. We would take turns walking out of the room to see what it was but before we could look down the dark stairs we would hear what sounded like someone running down the stairs as fast as they could so they couldn’t be seen. This continued for probably 2 hours ending with all of us huddled in the room upstairs with the door wedged shut with a chair until my Dad got home.
None of us were really believers in anything paranormal but a child’s imagination is a crazy thing. Now 15 years later, I still don’t know what to make of it but every one of us heard those footsteps walking up those dark stairs. I bring it up to my friend who I’m still friends with and he remembers it just as vividly as I do. It kind of creeps me out just thinking about it.
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In freshman year of middle school (6th grade) there was a once-a-week ‘group therapy’ session with developmentally delayed kids that involved them doing some crafts activity or playing with lego or watching a movie as a group. It was great though, because anyone could sign up for it.
I signed up pretty instantly as it meant an escape from History once a week. One of my best friends at the time had the same idea, and it basically turned into a second lunch period for us. The whole thing was overseen by a therapist named Bruce and it was generally pretty laid back.
Bruce was a 50-ish balding guy with the attitude and general appearance of Santa Claus. He ran most of the school’s extracurriculars and was pretty much universally liked. The other important player in this story was a kid who I’ll call G. You know that stereotype of serial killers being obsessed with animal torture as a kid? This was dead-on G.
He’d regularly tell these long excited stories during group about how much fun he had last week tearing the leg off a squirrel he caught in his live trap, or other similar things. Most of us just sort of ignored him as it was just sort of assumed that he was all talk and just making up gross stuff to get attention. So one week we were playing with play doh. Since it was school, the huge tub of play doh had long since assumed a uniform shade of brown and the general drive was to get people to build things and tell stories about them. Most people just built dinosaurs or threw clay at each other. G, for whatever reason, had a huge flat square slab laid out and was building four large pillars on the corners. He eventually put a roof on it, which wouldn’t stay on due to the lack of interior supports. The normal kids would always leave a few minutes early as the group ran right into the start of the next period and we’d need time to get to class.
I was no different, and walked out while Bruce and the other kids were smashing play doh, giggling and throwing chunks back into the bin. I got to my next class and the teacher wasn’t there. Nobody knew what was going on. About 10 minutes later she finally showed up looking frazzled and wouldn’t give us any information other than ‘something happened’ that needed staff attention. Being 6th graders, we went nuts with speculation.
A few hours later I ran into the friend from group, who was visibly jumpy and disturbed. He wouldn’t tell me why other than mentioning that therapy group was cancelled indefinitely. I kept prying for information and eventually got the story out of him. During the clean-up the play doh had to be compacted back into its tub. This involved lots of smashing play doh sculptures, a bit that the kids greatly enjoyed to the point where they’d try to smash other people’s stuff. G’s house was one of the last things to go.
He smashed down two columns, let one of the other kids smash another, and finally dared Bruce to smash the last one really hard. The last one had a pocketknife in it. I never saw either Bruce or G ever again.
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It was 2001 and my friend and I were 17 (both female) and driving back from a late movie to my house one night. I lived in a pretty rural area in Maine, about 20 minutes from the nearest town. As we were driving down the highway through the woods, we passed a median with a car sitting in it, facing in the oncoming direction, with all its lights off. Right after we drove past it, it flashed its lights, did a 3 point turn and started driving behind us. We giggled that “Oh, it must be a gang initiation, we’re gonna get murdered!” because this was Maine and that was obviously not what was happening.
The turnoff for my road was a few miles away and this car stayed behind us the whole time. We made the left turn and the car kept going down the highway. Phew!
30 seconds later we realized that the car must have backed up on the highway and made the turn after us. Now we were getting a little worried. There was still one more road to turn down before we got to my house (this is waay in the woods) and the car did the same thing. It backed up and made the left after us.
Now we were legitimately freaked.
I had a long driveway and the car followed us right into the driveway and almost up to my house, which had all the lights on because my mom was home. We ran into my house, just in time to see the mystery car reverse back down the driveway and drive away.
To this day we still have no idea why that car was following us – if they thought we were someone else or if they actually had bad intentions and only changed their mind when they saw that my houselights were on. Since we only ever saw the front of the car, we didn’t get a license plate or a better description than “a blue car”.
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When I was a child I was always stricken by this irrational fear that when I went outside at night, I had to walk STRAIGHT into the house without looking back, because if I looked back, someone would be following me.
One day after dinner I went out to the car to get my book bag, and I was continuing my ritual of walking straight inside without looking back, adrenaline pumping, anxiety going full force, and I just stopped and said to myself “this is stupid.” I made myself look back.
When I looked back I saw what appeared to be someone crouched down behind my mom’s car, peeking their head around. They were just staring at me and smiling. It appeared to be a woman in her mid 30s, maybe 40 with curly short blonde hair. We made eye contact for a second and then she ducked back behind the car where I couldn’t see her.
I stood frozen for a second and then ran inside. I told my mom, we went outside to check, no one was there. My mom was skeptical, but she wasn’t very concerned either.
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One night around 10 when I was around 16, my 2 brothers, parents, our 4 friends and I were sitting around watching ghost stories on tv. The living room was pretty packed and it was stationed right beside the main entry of the house.
Someone knocked on the door so my step dad went to answer it. There were two big built guys and they were asking to use the phone. My step dad was taking a bit long talking to them so my mother went out to the door to see what was going on. Then we all hear ‘Theres only two of them !’, and they hit my step dad and run in.
But when they come into the house, they instantly see seven 16 – 18 year olds staring at them. We all get up and they bolt out of the house scared . Had we not been there my parents would have been in serious trouble.
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I was in the orthopedic surgery wing of the hospital after getting my torn Achilles tendon repaired. It was a fairly long procedure and I was pretty groggy from the anesthesia after-effects combined with the morphine for the pain, but I did notice that I had a roommate that had both of his hands and feet wrapped in bandages. I could hear him talking to his father, but didn’t pay much attention because of how out of it I was at the time. I did remember hearing something about “Why did you stop taking your medication?”
I don’t know how morphine affects anyone else, but it gives me a very restless sleep combined with vivid dreams (almost nightmares; something I never have). So in the middle of the night, while turning over for the 100th time, I spied someone standing beside my bed in the dark. “Do you have any smokes?”
My roommate apparently was standing there watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake up to ask for a cigarette. It could be considered being very polite or very creepy, but when you are in a morphine induced haze it was definitely creepy. Later that day I heard the details of why he was there. He had gone off his meds and decided to quit smoking hard core. I mean liquid nitrogen cold turkey.
First he nailed his feet to the floor so he couldn’t go out for smokes. Then he took a butcher knife from the kitchen and cut off the fingers of his left hand so he couldn’t hold a cigarette. That’s where his plan kind of fell apart, because he had a lot of trouble cutting off the right fingers with no left fingers to hold the knife. He only got though three of them. I put this together between the conversations I overheard between family, nurses and doctors. I was supposed to be in there for another day, but they told me I could go home early if I was OK with taking Tylenol 3 for the pain.
I would have to stay if I needed the stronger morphine pain-killer so the staff could administer it. I said I would go home with aspirin if it meant getting out of that room. The head nurse at the nursing station was sympathetic, she said the guy really needed to be in a different kind of hospital but he had orthopedic issues that had to be dealt with and that’s why he was there. It wasn’t supernatural, just a disturbed individual who had hurt himself.
He probably couldn’t even have hurt anyone else considering his injuries, but in my morphine fog it was creepy as hell to me to have someone that disturbed 10 feet away while I was sleeping.
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A long time ago, my mother was a park manager. Small park on a beach with a public building for parties etc. It was her job to make sure it was clean, the bathrooms were stocked, and at night she had to drive down, make sure no one was still in the park/on the beach, then lock up the building and drive the long dirt road path to a gate that also had to be locked. I was maybe 16/17 at the time and I liked to go with her, to lend a hand. My father, for some reason, asked if we wanted him to go with us on this particular night. This wasn’t a normal occurrence, so we thanked him for the offer and went on our merry way. Everything went fine at the actual park. There were no stragglers, the sinks weren’t too sandy. We locked up and went to the gate.
I got out on one side to grab one end of the gate, my mom the other. As soon as I touched the gate, my hair stood on end and I felt like a deer in headlights. I looked over at my mom and said “Mom. We need to leave, now.”
We lived in a very small, very safe area. I began to panic, telling mom to hurry up. She began to react to me and did as I said. Just as we get to the car, I hear something crashing at high speed through the forest directly to our left. Then I see the silhouette of a hulking man bounding at us.
We get the doors open and hop in the car just time time to see… My father come out of the woods and bang on my moms window. He bellowed with laughter as we cried. He had parked his truck up the road and went through the woods to scare us and “prove a point” What a dick. Anyway, I believe in this 6th sense, I’ve experienced it. It’s an amazingly overwhelming sense that something is just not right, even if you can’t see what causes it right away. Instinct, perhaps?
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When I was around 14 years old, I really liked to go for runs with my shepherd lab. I lived in a fairly quiet, clean suburban neighborhood that was situated beside a broad expanse of pasture used by about ten horses (I would say it was roughly 40 acres).
Anyway, a bike path ran between the pasture and my neighborhood and I generally ran down the path. One night I decided to go with my pup around 10:00 pm. May not seem like the smartest decision, but I had spent many nights with my group of friends biking/rollerblading around the neighborhood so I thought nothing of the late hour.
I was running down the bike path with my dog, who is a a big pup yet the friendliest guy you’ll meet. As we ran I noticed a dark lump a little ways ahead, and because it was nearly pitch black I could barely see it. I dismissed it as a garbage bag. As we drew closer, my dog perked up his ears and his hackles went up and he started to growl…which he rarely ever does. He loves basically everything. I stopped running and stared as the ‘garbage bag’ started to move.
14 year old me still didn’t really know what the heck I was looking at, and it wasn’t until the supposed garbage stood up that I realized it was a man…who then started to run towards us! My dog then turned around and, I kid you not, started to run and yanked me along behind him. We reached a street, he darted down it, then pulled me into a dark alley, onto another street, then another alley, then another street, until we somehow lost the guy.
My dog saved my life, I’m pretty sure. The guy may not have been an axe murderer but it turns out some creepy ex felon was arrested in our neighborhood about two days later. I love my dog.
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Several years ago I lived in a semi-underground basement apartment. Basically the house was just enough underground that the windows were just a couple of inches off the ground on the outside.
So one night I’m washing dishes in the kitchen which had a window to my left which was open. I’m almost finished when a voice whispers, “Looking good there with the dishes.” There was someone crouched down by the window on the outside who had been watching me for who knows how long.
Unfortunately for this creep, I was washing the knives and as I turned he evidently got scared by the gigantic chef’s knife I was brandishing in his general direction and he ran off. I hated that apartment. Eventually I tacked thick fabric over most of the windows to avoid having to watch people pee drunkenly on them.
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Once as a teenager, I was leaving a fast food drive-thru and someone in an old bronco started to follow me. At first I thought it was a road rage situation and did the “sorry” wave, and tried to let him pass but he swerved at me like he was trying to hit my car. He pulled up alongside of me and was screaming out the window, just incoherently furious, continuing to swerve at me.
This was before the days of cell phones and I was in an unfamiliar area of town. I was driving a Firebird and tried to outrun him, but he would run red lights and make crazy turns to keep up with me. I eventually ran into a dead end and he pulled his truck across the road to block it. There were big ditches on either side so I was stuck.
He got out and started scrambling at my door handle (doors locked) and pounding on the windows, his face inches from mine just screaming and screaming in a way that seemed like he couldn’t even quite see me. Shaking and crying, I turned on my overhead light so he could see I was just a teenage girl and not who he was looking for and he jumped on my hood and started pounding (and drooling in thick, white smears) on my windshield.
I was screaming and crying and he stopped, held up one finger like “wait a minute” and scurried off to his truck. I floored the gas and ran into the ditch and drove like a crazy person for 45 minutes until I knew I had lost him. No idea what his deal was. My mom thought I made up this entire story to lie about the damage to my car, and still seems hesitant to believe me…
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I was walking home from the beach one day around noon and a guy driving down the street in a Ford Escape slows down and in slightly broken English asks me how much.
I tell him to screw off and he tells me $200 for an hour. At this point I’m walking faster and his car is keeping pace with me, he crosses two lanes and parks in a driveway in front of me and opens his door and a passenger door opens as well. Another guy steps out and walks towards me, I start screaming my head off and cussing them out trying to draw attention on this busy street while fishing my knife out of my bag.
I walked into the street and around the car, call my boyfriend and tell them its the cops. I give my boyfriend their license plate number and almost run to his house because it was about a block away. They followed me for another minute and then drove past me really fast while calling me rude names. I was 16 at the time and I really wish I had called the cops because as an adult I am 100% sure I was about to be kidnapped.
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When I was young we had a blind English Sheep Dog named Duffy. Duffy was an outdoor dog and navigated his way around the house by what he ran into with his head. He was as sweet as a dog could be. Our house was way out in the country, isolated in the woods.
One day a guy pulls up in our long dirt driveway and Duffy starts barking. My mother, home alone with the kids, walks outside to greet the visitor. The guy gets out of the car and tells my mom that he used to live in our house and would love to take a look at it now.
He begins to walk towards my mom. Duffy, the blind, useless sheep dog jumps to his feet and lets out a snarl that stopped the guy in his tracks. He begins barking and lunges towards the guy. My mom grabs him by the collar and says to the guy, “Mister, I don’t know who you are but you better get out of here before I let my dog go.” Without a word he jumps in his car and leaves. Years later we met the family that used to live there (small town) and that guy was not one of them…
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Rented a cabin for a week with my girlfriend. First night there we had spent the day visiting her family (the actual reason for our trip), had dinner, and she had a lot to drink. We get back to the cabin, I carry her inside – to find all our bags opened/dumped onto the floor. This set me into panic mode.
I hadn’t been drinking and I routinely carry, so I pull out my gun and sweep the house – I check every room, closets, even under the bed – nothing. My girlfriend is still fast asleep, so I check our stuff over and there’s nothing missing. It had just been dumped onto the floor. So I look around some more, all the windows are locked, the backdoor was even dead bolted. It just really bothered me that there was no sign of break in. I know I locked the place before I left, so either someone else had a key to my cabin, or whoever it was was still inside the cabin. Either way, I didn’t think I’d do much sleeping.
It was too late to make other arrangements, and considering that most likely there wasn’t anything to worry about really. We had been gone all day, from 9am – midnight. So odds are whoever it was did it was probably way earlier. But still… I couldn’t shake it. I went in and covered up my SO, used the bathroom, set up a rocking chair facing the front door – my hand on my gun on my lap, I started watch.
I felt pretty silly sitting there, but I couldn’t not sit there either. And some time around 3-4am, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning around 7am, sun shining through. I actually half scared myself because I hadn’t meant to fall asleep – which then scared me again because I wasn’t holding my gun. I start looking around, and on the couch is my gun. And the front door is wide open.
“NO WAY.” I jump up and start running to check on my girlfriend – thank God she was still there, untouched. I go back out into the living room and pick up my gun, all my bullets are missing.
I go outside and look around, car and everything is still there – no signs of anybody. I walk back inside, look in the far corner of the living room and I see the corner of the main living room rug lifted up. I investigate – it’s covering the opening to the crawlspace.
That means this guy was IN MY CABIN THE ENTIRE TIME. I must have pulled up and caught the guy in the act, he thought fast and hid in the crawlspace. Then some time during the night, crawled out, DISARMED ME, and walked right out the front door.
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A friend and I were coming home from the movies and there is a rural stretch of road about 20 minutes from my house. As we were driving down it a car pulled out of, what I thought at the time, a dirt road that led into the woods.
The car kind of crept up right behind my friend’s car and then would slow down and move back a bit and then move back up right behind us. At some point the car turned their brights on so we kind of just assumed it was a police car. So we started to slow down and pull off to the side.
At this point I noticed it was not a police car and while we were pulled off to the side, this car also slows down and casually as if they misjudged the distance between our cars nudged into the back of my friends car. So it was at that point we realized we should get back on the road and towards a more populated part of the city.
So this cat and mouse chase continues on through our city for another 20 minutes. At this point my friend decides that he’s had enough and so he pulls into a random driveway and turns the car off and immediately jumps out of the car.
I reluctantly got out of the car a few seconds after him and the car just slows to a crawl on the road, turns off the brights and we see into the car. Four teenagers, I’m assuming, with the windows down blaring Scissor Sister’s “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”.
As they roll by, we also realize the three passengers all have sock puppets that they are aggressively having dance along to the song. The transition from fear to absolute relief at the situation was just astounding.
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Grew up in a small town. I was out playing in the yard with my 2 younger siblings like every other summer day. A guy pulls up alongside the yard in a truck and calls me over. He asks my name, if I’m having a good summer.
He says he could really use my help, he’s out looking for his lost puppy. He can show me a photo of the puppy if I come closer. No, closer. The picture is small, can I please help him? I yelled to my brother on the other side of the yard “Daaaaaan, come help us find a puppy!” I have to assume he thought I yelled ‘dad’ because he screeched out of there without another word.
I remember being really worried about that puppy…until we had an assembly at our primary school about things strangers might say to lure you into their vehicles.
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